The [undefeated Yale football] team was led by quarterback Brian Dowling '69, who hadn't lost a game since the sixth grade (and was later immortalized by Garry Trudeau '70, '73MFA, as the character B.D. in his Doonesbury strip), and by Calvin Hill '69, who went on not just to sire Grant but to play for 12 years in the NFL. In the second half, Yale got a little sloppy, but with less than a minute left they still led 29-13. Then it was as if time slowed down, and in just 42 seconds Harvard somehow managed to score an improbable 16 points. The next day the headline in the Crimson said: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29."
That's also the title of a documentary film by Kevin Rafferty that was an unlikely hit at the recent Toronto Film Festival, not the kind of event where people tend to get carried away by old-time Ivy League football. Rafferty (Harvard, Class of '70) is an unreconstructed hipster and rebel, most famous for The Atomic Cafe, an anti-nuclear documentary that has become a cult classic, and works out of what must be the dingiest basement in all of Greenwich Village. If only the lighting were a little better, it could be the setting for the next installment of Saw. But he has, it turns out, a distinguished football heritage -- both his father and grandfather played for Yale -- and though he's hardly a rah-rah type, he saw the '68 game and it made an impression on him. "My father watched from the other side," he told me recently, "and afterwards I said to him, 'Dad, how did you like the game?' This was a guy who had been at Guam and Iwo Jima. He looked me in the eye and said, 'Worst day of my life.'"
--Charles McGrath (Yale '68) in the Yale Alumni Magazine, November/December 2008. You can see a contemporary recap of the game here.
